Tag Archives: copyright

Our County is adding many classrooms this year with remodeling and addition projects from a recent bond package. Definitely a lot to keep up with. In the photo, you see a classroom that is part of six in one complete mobile unit. They even contain bathrooms. Great stuff!

So, with new classrooms, what open source/technology would you put in them? Obviously, all of these will include a mounted projector, SMART Board, and computers. I really am pleased to see SMART offer their software in Linux, although we do run Windows at our schools. Since these are sixth grade classrooms, I really hope to introduce more computer programming, like CMU’s Alice program, the free (although not open) application for middle schoolers to help with object oriented programming. Some pretty good stuff. I would also like to encourage them to look at Robotics. Again, not open, but Lego does produce some decent software that will allow them to go open source on their construction of robots.

With the SMART Board, I hope to see some good lessons created, and I hope put in place some type of sharing resource for teachers. We probably have in excess of 300 SMART Boards in our 14 schools, and if we could post SMART Notebook files under a Creative Commons license, I would genuinely be proud of that effort.

More applications as well. I really want our schools to begin moving from proprietary software like Adobe and Tom Snyder products and moving to open source apps like Gimp and CMAP. Any chance where we can provide the same functionality, in open source, I want to move that way.

I am always a fan of good, sarcastic comics. If you look at the comics I read on a Sunday morning, I avoid the cutesy and head for Sally Forth, Rhymes With Orange, and that’s pretty much it. I really began looking at XKCD (http://xkcd.com), simple stick figure comics, dealing mostly with technology. Each day, a new one pops up in my feed, and some are pretty funny. The one below pokes Linux users in the tummy for sure!

What I like most of all is their site, and comics, fall under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial license. So yes, I *can* post this comic below to my site. And I could print it and use it on handouts. Just need to give attribution to the site, and then not sell it. Simple. Think of how classrooms could change if we could do this with other comics and images…